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But God, I wanted him to do it again. And that couldn’t happen.
Using the wall as my only help, I took a step away and toward the door, swallowing down all of the words that Iwantedto say to him. I had to go with my gut here if we stood any chance of this fizzling out—something it was clear we both wanted and needed to accomplish.
“I thought you were done avoiding me,” he said, his face almost unreadable in the low light of the shadow. His fingers stilled halfway through pushing a button into its hole.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. Words and whole sentences flowed through my mind, too many of them being too real, too honest, but I kept those locked behind my teeth and went with the easiest thing to say. “This is exactly why Ineedto avoid you.”
Chapter 10
Adrian
The slight resistance of the wooden keys beneath my fingertips did little to take my mind off the way Ava’s skin had felt beneath them, but I played on nonetheless.
The morning sun trickled in through the wall of windows to my right. Cascading beams of slightly dusty yellow bounced off the top of my closed Steinway. I wasn’t normally one to play this early, but I’d hardly gotten any sleep and needed something for my hands to do besides touching myself. I’d done enough of that tossing and turning well into the morning hours, and my body’s internal clock hadn’t let me regain that lost time.
I’d waited the hour it had taken for Lucas to get up for school before letting myself focus on the grand piano, though.
Every note that I played filled all three floors of my penthouse. It drowned out the sound of sizzling eggs in the kitchen, drowned out the cartoons from the living room, drowned out Lucas’s insistence that he didn’t want to wear his vest today but would agree to wear his sweater, drowned out the clacking of his brand-new shoes against the tile as he ran across the house.
But it did nothing to drown out the sound of Ava’s voice as she said my name. The memory was repeating over and over andover again in my mind. The little gasp, the strained moan of it, the way she’d laughed when she’d called methe worst.
Maybe Iwasthe worst.
I’d be a liar if I tried to tell myself that she wasn’t plaguing my thoughts or tempting me to do things I promised myself I’d never do again. Even knowing that neither of us wanted more from the situation after the charity ball, I couldn’t help but feel an inkling ofwhat if. But that was thinking with the wrong one of my two heads. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t date seriously again—for the sake of my sanity and the fragility of Lucas after losing his mother, I couldn’t do that. And even considering it with Ava came with its own challenge: David fucking Riley. Her father. My friend.
Just as I turned the page of sheet music and my fingers stilled for a moment, clacking bounded closer, climbing up the stairway outside of the music room. Lucas popped his head in just as Grace caught up with him.
“Sorry, Mr. Stone,” she wheezed, out of breath. “Lucas was wondering if you’d mind taking him to school this morning. I tried to tell him that you were busy?—”
“Not at all,” I said. I pulled the fallboard back over the keys and pushed up from my seat. “Have you got twenty minutes to spare for me to get dressed?”
Lucas nodded over-enthusiastically before tipping his head forward and holding an imaginary hat with his fingertips. “Aye, captain.”
I knew bingeing threePirates of the Caribbeanmovies last night had been a poor decision.
I chuckled as I stepped around the piano, ruffling the top of his black mop of hair when I passed him. I still had an hour until I needed to be in the office—I could swing it. “Arr, I’ll be back in a jiffy,matey.”
————
Lucas’ question seconds before we’d walked in through the front doors of his school had left me in a sour mood.
Dad, do you think you could maybe work a little less?
I knew he didn’t mean for it to feel like a knife to the chest, but it did regardless. In truth, I was working an average amount at the moment, minus a small handful of nights a week where I had an event to oversee or a meeting to stay late for, but I understood. He was getting older, and he was starting to notice my absence more and more.
A nanny didn’t make up for the emptiness of our penthouse or the emptiness that Jan had left behind. But it was all I could offer him for now, save for trying to take a few more nights off.
But it left me bitter and annoyed that I couldn’t do that for him now, and coupled with the nonstop onslaught of thoughts of Ava, I wasn’t in the greatest of headspaces for a fucking board meeting.
“So, Les Brown has confirmed. We still haven’t had confirmation from Tony Robbins yet, but his team has pretty much given us the green light,” Andrew said as he aimed his laser pointer at the projected image of a man’s face. He was one of the board members with the most shares in Stone & Co Global besides me.
“We can’t assume that,” I said, looking up from the empty document that I’d opened almost an hour ago to take notes.So much for that.“If he’s not outright confirmed, we can’t plan or price tickets accordingly. Have you gotten on his team’s case?”
Andrew pushed his glasses up his nose, his glare leveled at me as if I’d just sprouted a second head. “Of course I have.”
For the briefest of seconds, an image of Ava with her makeup smeared and her hair a mess flitted through my mind. I clicked the top of my pen against the table to give my hand something to do. “And what have they said in response?”
A muscle in Andrew’s ginger-beard-covered jaw twitched. “Had you been listening, Adrian, you would have heard that I’ve already said they are dealing with a scheduling conflict and working around it.”
